Downloading and Installing FTL... freeze on installation debian 9.4

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1

Please follow the below template, it will help us to help you!

Expected Behaviour:

This should complete and installation should continue:

Downloading and Installing FTL.../tmp/tmp.tlvwELuiKR /etc/.pihole

Actual Behaviour:

Machine freezes at full CPU utilization. Can no longer SSH into the machine, nor use tty for login.

Debug Token:

not available

Additional information:

Here is the installation log up until the point where the system freezes.

Additional clues:

The system is a ESXi 6.5 VM, 2GB RAM, 16GB HDD (i3-6100 CPU) which has ran Pihole with great success last year (using debian jessie). The system was left unused for a while until now, where it is dire time to do maintenance.

I've managed to bring Debian from 8.7 to date (apt-get update, apt-get upgrade) updated pihole successfully (pihole -up) to most current version.
Then I decided to jump to Debian 9.4 which also updated successfully. Pihole started to act up (loosing the graphs in the gui). Could not solved by (pihole -up).
Then loosing proper IPv4 in the webgui. Found this possibly due to a lack of consistency (likely user-inflicted during general late-night mayhem following general network problems) in DHCP vs static settings in the /etc/network/interfaces.

I uninstalled and attempted to reinstall pihole completely. This is where I am now. I cannot manage to get past the FTL download and installation.

Any help is appreciated.

Cheers

edit1:
Further clues:
As per this thread: Pi-hole v3.3 Released: It's "Extra" Special I've verified dnsmasq:

user@pihole:~$ sudo dnsmasq -v
Dnsmasq version 2.76 Copyright (c) 2000-2016 Simon Kelley
Compile time options: IPv6 GNU-getopt DBus i18n IDN DHCP DHCPv6 no-Lua TFTP conntrack ipset auth DNSSEC loop-detect inotify

2

Please send us the token generated by

pihole -d

or do it through the Web interface:

1 Like
3

At that point, the installer is downloading FTL from github.com. Do you have any trouble connecting to that domain?

4

pihole cannot be installed, there is no output of <pihole -d>:

user@pihole:~$ pihole -d
-bash: pihole: command not found
user@pihole:~$

5

no.
Part of the installation seems to already have been checking github, below excerpt from pastebin:
[✗] Check for existing repository in /etc/.pihole
[✓] Clone GitHub - pi-hole/pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements into /etc/.pihole

[✗] Check for existing repository in /var/www/html/admin
[✓] Clone GitHub - pi-hole/web: Pi-hole Dashboard for stats and more into /var/www/html/admin

the directory /var/www/html/admin is populated:

user@pihole:/var/www/html/admin$ ls -l
total 12
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 api_db.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 api_FTL.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 api.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 api_PHP.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 auditlog.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 CONTRIBUTING.md
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 db_graph.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 db_lists.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 db_queries.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 debug.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 gravity.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 help.php
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 1 12:30 img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 index.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 LICENSE
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 list.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 queries.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 queryads.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 README.md
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jun 1 12:30 scripts
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 settings.php
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jun 1 12:30 style
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 taillog-FTL.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 1 12:30 taillog.php

checking for github network:

user@pihole:~$ dig github.com

; <<>> DiG 9.10.3-P4-Debian <<>> github.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 43180
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;github.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
github.com. 59 IN A 192.30.253.112
github.com. 59 IN A 192.30.253.113

;; Query time: 46 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.0.1#53(192.168.0.1)
;; WHEN: Fri Jun 01 12:37:07 CEST 2018
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 71

Furthermore, I reproduced the problem in a fresh install of Debian 9.4, installation hangs at the same spot.

1 Like
6

Here is additional output of another command found in a thread on figuring out what's not going well:

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | sudo bash -x

Notably at the very end, that's where it hangs:

full output: https://pastebin.com/7byWCMQa

the link to pihole-FTL-linux-x86_64 can be downloaded manually on a WS behind the same network. Does not seem to be a general connectivity issue?

7

same problem over here with debian stable and oldstable

1 Like
8

Do you have sufficient free space on your drive?

9

hello, tnx for tuning in.
I'd expect there to be enough space.
14G and 17G respectively (on the old and the new lab-vm)

pi@pihole:~$ df -H
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 1.1G 0 1.1G 0% /dev
tmpfs 211M 3.3M 207M 2% /run
/dev/sda1 19G 1.1G 17G 6% /
tmpfs 1.1G 0 1.1G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.3M 0 5.3M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 1.1G 0 1.1G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 211M 0 211M 0% /run/user/1000

10

In your output https://pastebin.com/7byWCMQa at line 802 there is a temp FTL directory with a random name

pushd /tmp/tmp.JtGBNf344s

If you repeat the installation with

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | sudo bash -x

and it aborts, change to the new temp FTL directory. Does the directory contain the following files?

  • pihole-FTL-linux-x86_64 (MD5: 6a8d5a1f3b407d6b7c165fd24378c512)
  • pihole-FTL-linux-x86_64.sha1 (MD5: 50db4d3ded4793d47449f837cc3a8f02)
11

The installer no longer hangs at the specific stage without any other intervention from me.
At around line 771, https://pastebin.com/7tSUrdnV you'll see the current progress.

Presently it is stuck at "pending..." for the s3.amazonaws.com (simple_ad.txt). (approx 30min)
I recognise this is a different error. What's the way to proceed, granted that I'm in the midst of a fresh install process?
cheers!

12

Ok, the download of https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_tracking.txt passed.
But it stopped during the download of https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt.

If you execute the command

curl https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt

it should output a lot of domains.

The output of

curl -s https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt | md5sum

should be

0a43bd5ebd9b3e2ee08a205d163cb0ac -

Is there an issue with your network/internet connection. Is it unstable?

13

Oh man. I don't even ....
A couple of iterations later
I've come to realize every failed installation requires to reinvoke the old config file since the current /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf gets blanked out, causing the lighttpd service to not load properly on reboot(after freeze), and in turn, cause all sorts of madness during the installation process.
Once lighttpd is in place, the installation has fighting chance to work.
I've right now gotten stuck at the same s3.amazonaws.com multiple times.

Once executing
curl https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt
it does output a lot of domains, one time, most of the attempts it causes system freeze.

Meanwhile
curl -s https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt | md5sum
causes a system freeze every time.

Currently I'm apparently halfway installed, again, since currently the output of

pi@pihole:~$ systemctl --failed
UNIT LOAD ACTIVE SUB DESCRIPTION
● lighttpd.service loaded failed failed Lighttpd Daemon
● pihole-FTL.service loaded failed failed pihole-FTL.service

I'm under the impression there is too much randomised back clashes in progress to make decent sense out of this mess.

14

Errors vanished!
From magic, the installation followed through today.

Recipe for success:

  1. Make sure lighttpd.service is loaded properly.
  2. Attempt reinstallation approx 30 times. Don't give up.

I'm grateful to all contributors for assistance in this thread.

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